


Skin Deep

by Name1



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Amphibians, Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Idiots in Love, Pre-Relationship, Romance, Touching, sick-fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24703498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Name1/pseuds/Name1
Summary: Not even a minute later Din gives up on washing his blue-tinged hands and turns back to say something sarcastic to Cara but stops dead in his tracks as he takes in her face. She’s no longer flushed; she’s bright red and blotchy. Her lips are no longer pouty and fuller than normal; they’re unnaturally swollen. Even her eyes and nose are watering, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She looks terrible.“What the Hell’s wrong with your face?” He cringes as soon as the words left his mouth, but he was more worried about her than his word choice. He could pay for that later.She tilts her head at him. What the hell did he just say? “You should be more worried about what’s going to be wrong with your face, with words like that.”She’s oddly self-conscious now. “Jeez Din, I know I look like crap in this heat, but I don’t thin—"“No, you’re all swollen and red!” he says, as he gestures to her face. She reaches up and touches her mouth which had been feeling weird, but she thought was just dry mouth due to dehydration. Her lips were huge even just to the touch.Oh shit.
Relationships: Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV) & Cara Dune & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune/The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 41
Kudos: 110





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lady_Vibeke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Vibeke/gifts).



> So, uh....Lady_Vibeke, here's your birthday fic.  
> I only missed it by....... let's just say a couple of days :)  
> Just squint and pretend it's 3k too. 
> 
> Happy birthday!

They had been traveling together for just under three weeks and Din was more than surprised at how easy it had been. They lived as if they had been together for years or had simply been meant to travel together all along--no squabbles, no disagreements, and no issues with shared chores. The only ground rule they needed to discuss when she came aboard was the night routine, but Din felt foolish bringing it up at all--she was even more careful than he was.

He shouldn't have been surprised, looking back. Where everyone else always tried to get him to remove his helmet, she never even suggested it. If her beauty and her strength didn't make her stand out, that fact alone did. She never tried to sneak and see him without his knowledge either—she would be offended beyond belief in someone even suggested it. She went out of her way to avoid the shower in the mornings and looked down every time he entered the room until he first acknowledged that he'd seen her just in case he forgot to don his prized possession.

She didn't even seem to realize she did it. She just respected his way of life and that’s all it took for her to rearrange her own life accordingly--that's all there was to it. For the first time he could remember, the helmet didn't seem like a burden around other people. It wasn’t a barrier because she didn’t allow it to be one. It just didn't exist to her….he was just Din.

If she ever did accidentally see his face, while his life as he knew it would be forever changed, he'd be more worried about her than himself once the initial panic subsided. She’d never forgive herself and feel so guilty that his own distress would seem almost insignificant in comparison. She lived with enough regret as it was, and he couldn’t bear it if he added to it. _Why did he care about her so much already? It made no sense. He had only known her a handful of months and that time had been punctuated with two separations._

For years he had off and on questioned the way of life he had adopted as a Mandalorian, but instead of making him question his beliefs, her presence only bolstered them. He’d been told as a child it would be impossible to ever be close with someone outside his Clan because they couldn’t understand his way of life, but he had found that to be false. It was almost the opposite, in fact. While his clan had expectations of him he couldn’t live up to and had seen him fail to even live up to the standards he set for himself. the past didn’t matter to Cara; she just liked him as he was right now without any desire to change him or focus on his failings.

Each person he had met through his years of travel had changed him in one way or another; some for the better and some for the worse; but changed all the same. Cara had been the first person who hadn’t changed him at all. While that might sound cold spoken aloud, it was anything but. He didn’t feel different with her, just like a more pure, more true version of himself--the himself he saw when he looked in the mirror, not the Din other people wanted or expected him to be. For the first time he could remember, he was happy just being himself.

_‘It was a strange kind of happiness though_ ,’ he thought. He couldn’t understand it, but he was at his happiest when she and the kid were happy, not himself. _What was that about_? 

This wasn’t the first time he wondered, ‘ _what was this feeling that keeps bringing me back to her?_ ’

It wasn't just _one_ feeling, that was the problem. She was complicated and he wasn’t sure if that was a woman thing or just a Cara thing.

In his experience when you meet a new person you lump them into a tidy box and associate at best one simple pre-set emotion regarding them: affection, friendship, respect, competitiveness, or lust. He didn’t think it was possible to feel more than one at a time--maybe that’s why Cara was such an enigma--he felt them all. And not one at a time either; they were all so jumbled together in this swirling mix in his head he could never hope to untangle them into individual emotions again….

_Affection_? Definitely. Without a doubt. He had more affection for this woman than he’d ever had for anyone. He genuinely _liked_ her. Even when she was at her most prickly on purpose to drive people away, he still liked her and who she was under that thorny covering.

_Friendship_? That was clear to even a perfect stranger. She was the best friend he’d ever had though she often spouted the nonsense that she wasn’t ‘friend material.’ _What a load of bullshit._

_Respect_? That was a two-way street. He’s never felt so respected and so _good_ as when she looked at him and his respect for her in return seemed endless. He respected her strength, her resolve, her compassion despite the shit hand she’d been dealt, and even her bull-headedness. _He’d never admit to that last one though._

_Competitiveness_? He almost snorted at the thought of all the stupid things she talked him into under the guise of proving she was better at something than he was. He had always been a showoff deep down and something in her teasing challenges spoke straight to the hidden playful child he had never really gotten to be. Their competitive sparring had turned into mere _playing_ more than once and he was surprised to find himself laughing at the victorious look on her face when she pinned him to the ground.

_Lust_? He wasn’t even going to go there. She was gorgeous, that’s all he would allow himself to think along that dangerous, slippery slope. He could admire her perfect body without being a creep--he could; though his nebulous dreams filled with dark hair, strong thighs, and her stupid smirk that woke him up in the middle of the night were a different story all together. Simple lust would have been easy, but what he felt when in the presence of her beauty went more than skin deep…

If he had felt just one of those feelings for her maybe things would be easy, but he felt them all… it was exasperating and beautiful at the same time, typical Cara.

She was so far under his skin by this point it was hard to remember what it had been like before before her….

In addition to getting used to the feelings that were getting harder to suppress and tended to show themselves at the most inopportune times, Din was getting used to living in comfortable clothes with just his face covered too. With them living together long-term he couldn’t very well walk around in armor day in and day out for weeks in deep space, so he made the decision to live as casually as he could while keeping only his face covered. Having someone see his neck and arms wasn’t as hard as he thought, probably because he knew she wouldn’t push him or tease him about it.

Well, she would, _of course_ , but it was the kind of teasing he was growing addicted to. Her teasing wasn’t making fun of him; it was warm and it felt familiar by now; comforting in a way.

The first time she had seen him in his sleep shirt and pants at the breakfast table, she whistled a catcall at him and made some comment about him being practically naked, while smiling the whole time at seeing him so relaxed. She might have looked at him like he was a prime nerf steak and wiggled her eyebrows at him to boot, but he was too distracted by hearing the word ‘ _naked_ ,’ fall from her lips with her hair all mussed from sleep to feel embarrassed. What he felt was something else entirely that made him feel warm all over.

‘ _Why did she have to look like that when she woke up_ ,’ he wondered; the creases still visible in her warm skin from the folds in the blanket she slept on. He wanted to trace his fingers along them down her face and neck to where they disappeared under her sleep shirt. _He needed another cold shower._ He would never make any kind of unwanted overture that would risk the friendsh--, no, partnersh--, no, _relationship_ they had built over all this time for anything...but sometimes it seemed like…..well…..it seemed like it wasn't _unwanted_ at all. The way she looked at him sometimes made him feel like she felt the same way he did; like she watched him from afar too, wanting to get closer.

For as much as she generally disliked ‘ _people_ ,’ she could turn on the charm when she wanted and Din had witnessed it firsthand among vendors and quarries alike. However, the humor, sass, and flirting she turned on outside the ship was very different from the humor, sass, and flirting she showed him in between making dinner, playing sabacc, and sparring in their shared exercise area. The closer he looked, the more clues he thought he saw but he wondered if he was only seeing what he wanted to see. If she wanted to take this a step in a different direction, he would be more than happy to take that step with her, but how would he be sure? He didn’t want to rock the boat, _ship_ , so to speak.

Despite his jumbled thoughts, their time together these past weeks had been so surprisingly easy that Din felt like they were due some sort of reward for having such a good start to their journey traveling together--they hadn’t murdered each other yet, and that fell into the category of being functional adults. He decided to land the Crest for a day so they could do some preventative maintenance and stretch their legs. They were due some downtime.

They landed on a flat piece of ground that backed up to a swamp with plenty of shallow pools for the kid to play in. As soon as they touched down, Cara could see there were dozens of little blue frogs on the banks of the ponds. Their skin was so smooth and velvety to look at, almost like felt. As soon as they walked down the ramp the kid was staring them down with the most intense focus she’s ever seen on his little face and his stalking posture was one of the funniest things she had ever seen.

After a late lunch, they take turns watching the kid and working on the engine as the suns gets lower. It’s surprisingly relaxing to get fresh air and do manual labor while the kid plays under supervision. Cara was first in the belly of the ship and so Din watches the kid playing at the closest pool.

Maybe an hour later Cara swings down from one of the support bars as she finishes her half of the job and he can’t help but notice she has grease all across her cheek and down the front of her shirt. _How could she look even more beautiful covered in engine grease and grime, he’ll never know._

“Your turn, Din,” she admits in defeat, after finishing up with the primary engine. “If I stay in there any longer, I’m going to have a heat stroke.” She takes off her outer shirt and wipes at the sweat across her brow and across the back of her neck before dipping it down the top of her tank top and then up the front to dab at the sweat collecting across her stomach and under her chest.

“What?” she asks suspiciously, when she notices he’s staring a little too intently and never responded to her words.

“You have uhhh…there’s something on your face.”

“Where?” she asks, as she wipes her shirt over her face again but it’s too oily to come off and she ends up smudging it even worse.

“Here, let me.” She watches him in surprise as he takes his gloves off outside the privacy of the ship. She sees him in common clothes everyday now, but she’s never seen him take off his gloves on a planet before. _She’s not sure why it strikes her so much._

“Here,” he says, as he brushes his thumb along the line of engine grease that follows her cheekbone.

“Did you get it?” she asked as she stood perfectly still.

“No. Sorry, it’s not coming off.” It was stubborn, despite passing his finger passing over it several times.

“That’s okay. I’ll wash it off later.”

A moment passes where his hand lingers on her face before he lets it drop back down to his side and tries to pretend he doesn’t want to try again just for the excuse of touching her. “So, uh. What is there left to do?”

She counts off her fingers as she lists what’s been done and still needs attention. “I took care of everything inside the turbines and engine block. You need to go around the outside and tighten the bolts back down so it doesn’t rattle apart one section at a time, refill all the fluids I drained, and check the final levels.”

The kid took advantage of their technical pass-down and their focus on one another to make a leap for the closest frog, but Cara must have still had one eye on him because she lunged past Din like a cat, almost knocking him over. While the kid already had it halfway in his mouth and was trying hard to chomp it down, Cara was quicker and plucked it out of his mouth before he can swallow it.

Luckily the poor thing is still alive and looks up at her like she’s a savior from on high. The little amphibian is covered in blue slime that she doesn’t remember seeing across it’s felt-like skin. They looked almost silky hopping around the pool. It must have been a survival tactic to prevent a predator from eating them.

“Hey,” she says to get the kids attention. He looks up at her face before his attention is drawn back to the little blue morsel in her hands. “We said no eating. Just looking,” she reminds him. “Did you forget?”

“Of course, you didn’t forget,” she mutters under her breath when his ears go up; a clear sign he was thinking about getting into mischief again as soon as her back was turned.

“Din!,” she calls out, over the short space separating them, “your kid’s over here eating frogs again! Talk to your boy!”

Din takes a step closer to the green fuzzy terror. “Kid, we talked about this…..”

He sighs, when he realizes his complaints are falling on deaf and soft ears. _You can’t reason with a baby. The best you can do is watch them like a hawk and intervene when necessary_. He’s lucky Cara is so vigilant.

She goes to the edge of the pool and releases the frog back to nature to live another day.

She addressed the kid again. “Okay. Din’s wrapping up the repairs, so it’s just me and you kid and I’m not taking my eyes off you for a second.” She sits down and he climbs in her lap.

“Is this your way of apologizing?’ she asks, already feeling less upset. “It’s pretty damn cute if it is.”

Din watches the whole exchange and feel this weird heavy feeling in his chest. _She’s so good with him._ She’s saved his cute little green behind more than once now and she just comes to his aid so naturally it’s like the three of them have been together from the very beginning. It’s easy for Din to focus on the kid and not think about how many times Cara has saved his own ass with her calm head and her ability to shoot or fight her way out of dangerous situations he usually get them into.

She’s sitting with the kid and notices he keeps trying to lick and chew on her gloves, probably chasing the lingering taste of frog. Sweat is running down her face and burning her eyes the longer she sits in the setting sun but her gloves are sticky with blue slime so she tries to wipe it off on her pants before she can’t help herself and wipes across her forehead, cheeks and mouth where the sweat was dripping down her face. The metallic taste was instant across her lips and she spit several times to try to get rid of it.

“Gross. You owe me a new pair of gloves kid,” she informs his little innocent grumpy face. “You good for it or you need me to loan you some credits? I’ll give you a good deal on interest rates since you’re so cute.”

He just stares up at her with his big eyes, apparently having forgiven her for stealing his prize away.

She sighs as his little face looking up at her. “If only we could buy fuel and supplies with your cuteness….”

Din gets back to work before he’s caught staring again. He had left his gloves off to get some of the smaller bolts loosely threaded back on before tightening them down with the driver.

By the time he finishes tightening everything down and refilling the reservoirs, he’s sweating just as badly as she had been, even without climbing around inside the metal housing. He can see her from the open panel on the Crest but her eyes looked shiny; even more glossy than usual from where she’s sitting with the kid. Her cheeks were flushed and he could see a lovely pink blush working its way down her throat to her collarbones. Her pupils were dilated and she looked….. _different_ ….and while something was _off_ , it wasn’t unappealing at all.

Din calls out to her, “hey, why don’t you go grab some water?”

“Ok, watch the little guy, then. He’s sneaky,” she reminds him, as she stands and turns toward the ramp. “I’ll be right back.” It doesn’t take her 30 seconds to grab a bottle of water from the counter but as soon as she takes the first sip, she hears Din’s panicked yelp. She rushes outside, blaster drawn, just to see Din kneeling in front of the kid trying to wrestle another frog out of his mouth. This one is huge and the snotty substance it’s producing in a last ditch survival attempt is all over Din’s hands and the kid’s mouth, alike. She’s sure of it now, it had to be a defense mechanism in the face of certain consumption.

She looks over and sees his hands covered in blue slime from where he was digging around in the little green mouth and can’t help but laugh at how a grown man is losing a battle with a baby who looks upset to lose his tasty prize.

“Hey! Let it go!” he tells the kid firmly “We had an agreement.”

Cara stands with her hands on her hips after she puts her blaster back in its holster, looking unimpressed. “I leave you two alone for one minute and he shows you who’s the boss? Really Din?”

“Apparently,” he admits, with a sign. With a final tug the poor creature is pulled free from the hungry little mouth and Din tosses it aside once he sees it’s still alive to hop away.

“Ugghhh” he lets out a disgusted sound, as he looks at the mess covering his hands. Cara picks up the grumpy little green alien and places him high up on the ramp while Din goes to wash off his hands in the pond.

Not even a minute later Din gives up on washing his blue-tinged hands and turns back to say something sarcastic to Cara but stops dead in his tracks as he takes in her face. She’s no longer flushed; she’s bright red and blotchy. Her lips are no longer pouty and fuller than normal; they’re unnaturally swollen. Even her eyes and nose are watering, but she doesn’t seem to notice. _She looks terrible_.

“What the Hell’s wrong with your face?” _He cringes as soon as the words left his mouth, but he was more worried about her than his word choice. He could pay for that later._

She tilts her head at him. _What the hell did he just say?_ “You should be more worried about what’s going to be wrong with _your face_ , with words like that.”

She’s oddly self-conscious now. “Jeez Din, I know I look like crap in this heat, but I don’t thin—"

“No, you’re all swollen and red!” he says, as he gestures to her face. She reaches up and touches her mouth which had been feeling weird, but she thought was just dry mouth due to dehydration. Her lips were huge even just to the touch.

_Oh shit_.

“You’re having some kind of allergic reaction,” he helpfully supplies, as she comes to the same conclusion, though it makes no sense

“To what?” she asks. “I haven’t eaten anything and I’ve been wearing gloves this whole time….”

She suddenly remembers the metallic taste and how she had wiped her face with the back of her gloved hand.

“I wiped some sweat off with my glove,” she admits aloud, “but I only got a little of that blue stuff on my face, the kid had a whole frog in his mout—” Her brain catches up and she makes a realization—

“The kid!!”

They rush over to the kid and frantically look him over, examining him for any new changes to his appearance. He’s his normal shade of green, not blotchy at all, and his tiny nose isn’t runny. She even opens his mouth and feels his little tongue to make sure it’s not swollen.

“It must have been poisonous, but just to humans,” Din reasons, as he lets himself feel relieved the kid is okay. “Either he must have an iron stomach or is just weirdly impervious to those things.”

Cara’s thought about this before way back on Sorgan. “Frogs are likely his normal diet, so it makes sense that he would be immune to their defensive mechanisms.”

With the kid seemingly alright, his focus moves back to her. “Are you okay? Can you breathe okay?” Din asks, taking a step closer to her. She takes a couple of deep breaths to test out her lung function and swallows to test her throat. “Yeah, I think so, just a localized allergic reaction for now.”

He watches her, unconvinced she’s not putting on a brave face for his benefit, but she’s already forgotten about herself as the takes in the blue hue still clinging to his hands despite rinsing them in the pond.

“Din, you have it all over your hands. It’s everywhere. Go shower off NOW.”

“I feel fine, I’m worried about your face,” he argues, more worried about her and the kid.

“I don’t care if you feel fine! A lot of it’s already soaked in. Go!” She shoves him up the ramp toward the bathroom. “I’ll wash off this little guy in the kitchen sink.”

....  
Continued in Chapter 2


	2. Chapter 2

………

Chapter 2

Din came out of the bathroom, helmet in place, but sporting different clothes than earlier. She was expecting him to say again what a waste of time it had been to shower off, but she was surprised when he braced himself against the door jam. “I feel weird.” 

Din never admitted to any kind of weakness or illness, so the simple statement caught her off guard. “Weird how?” she asked as she moved closer.

He doesn’t have a great description, something just feels ‘ _off_.’

“My face feels funny,” he tells her.

That sounds ominous, she thinks. “Did you touch your face before you washed your hands off in the shower?”

“No,” he replies.

“Shit,” she cursed, as she took in his weird posture. “It must have gotten in our systems through the skin and you had a lot more on you than I did.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, holding his hands out in front of him which retain an azure hue even after repeated scrubbing.

She has more questions for him. “Can you breathe okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, as he’s counting his own breathing rate to be sure it’s steady.

She does some mental gymnastics. She hadn’t worked out the details of how to care for someone whose face she can’t see to determine his wellness. “Since I can't look in your mouth, go back to the bathroom and look to see if your throat is swollen. Can you swallow?”

Watches him visibly swallow and watches his Adam’s apple rising and falling above the collar of his sleep shirt he put on post-shower.

“Hold on, I’m going to find the flashlight,” she tells him. She’s only gone a few minutes but she’s strangely worried and fumbles through the emergency box looking for the light.

She makes it back to him and hands it over so he can go perform a self-assessment, but he hesitates, holding his stomach while braced against the door. “Cara, I feel worse than even just a few minutes ago.”

“Worse how?” she asks hoping, _really hoping_ , he not going to turn anaphylactic on her. She’s not qualified to deal with that, short of performing a field tracheotomy.

“I think I might puke. I feel dizzy,” he explains. “My skin hurts all over.”

“Okay forget the flashlight,” she decides, taking in his hunched over posture. “How does it feel when you swallow. Does your throat feel like it’s closing up? Does your tongue feel swollen?”

He tries to keep up with her rapid-fire questions but he just wants to lay down. “No, just sick.”

She’s relieved by his answer. Her voice is stern, not allowing for any questions when she gives him direction. “Sit down on your bed. I'll turn the lights off and grab you a bucket.”

“What about you?” he says, when he sees how jerky her motions are--she’s usually so graceful. She must be feeling sick too. _Why is she taking care of him and not herself?_

“I don't feel that bad,” she lies convincingly, “I only got a little on my face.” In truth, her stomach was churning and her skin hurt all over too but she’s already decided she’ll take care of him first and then focus on herself later; it’s not really a question.

He sits down on the edge of his bunk with his knees bent and she stands in front of him watching him like he might explode any second.

It feels so good to sit down and he just goes ahead and lies down instead, though his legs are still hanging off and his feet are on the floor. She kicks his feet and shoves his legs onto the bed. “Okay, come on, get in bed then,” she says, as she climbs in next to him. It’s a tight fit; the bunks aren’t really meant for two people, but she manages to wiggle herself next to him as he shifts his way up to reach his pillow.

“What’s going on?” he asks, when it becomes clear she’s making herself comfortable for the night beside him.

“I’m staying here for the night to keep an eye on you. You’re breathing sounds horrible, and I’m not explaining to your kid how your throat closed up overnight or you choked on your own vomit because you were too stubborn to accept help. I’m going to watch you through the night and you’re not going to argue about it.”

“Who's going to watch _you_?” he asks.

“Maybe, I can take care of myself,” she insists, clearly annoyed.

“ _Maybe_ , you’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met,” he counters, to her stubborn claim. _He knows that’s not a maybe._

“ _Maybe you’re_ trying to change the subject and failing miserably.”

He finally seems comfortable on the pillow, even with his helmet on, but she can feel how drenched his clothes are. He’s sweating like a leaky faucet and it must be so uncomfortable to be sitting in his own perspiration. _That’s probably good though; his body is trying to expel that foreign substance._ She reaches down to removes his wet socks and replaces them with her own dry ones from her feet. He doesn’t say anything but makes a sound that relays his pleasure at the new dry foot coverings.

“You are completely drenched, Din,” she observes. “Aren’t you hot?”

“Can you be hot and cold at the same time? Everything hurts,” he says, as he’s pulling his clothes away from where they’re tight around his knees and elbows. “My skin is on fire; it feels like all my nerves are exposed when anything rubs against it.”

She crawls off the bed to turn down the temperature before grabbing the kid and crawling back into the narrow bed for the remainder of the night.

_First things first though--those sopping clothes have to go._

She rucks his shirt up his stomach before she gets it up to his chest and it catches under his armpits. “Raise your arms,” she instructs him.

He listens and raises his arms. She uses one hand to push down on his head to make sure the beskar stays put, while her other hand works the neckline of his shirt over his helmet. Once he’s free of his shirt, his skin feels so much better and he sinks back down on to the mattress with a sigh.

She’s unfastening his pants and shucking them down his hips before he realizes she’s not done.

“What are you doing?” he asks, as he feels her hands tugging at his pants.

“Taking your clothes off,” she explains plainly. “Your skin will be much less irritated, and you can dry out that way, too.”

“Oh, okay,” he says, with a soft distracted voice. He wants to sleep.

‘ _That makes sense_ ,’ his fuzzy brain thinks, so he straightens his knees to help her get them off. She turns the lights out when he’s down to his shorts and pulls the sheet up over him to keep him warm.

“I’m taking this off, don’t turn the lights on,” he says, before he removes his helmet and places it on the shelf above him.

Once the layer of sweat dries he’s going to go from hot to freezing and she knows her clothes are probably scratchy against his painfully sensitive skin. There’s only one solution to both of those problems that she can think of.

_It’s dark, what Hell._

She strips out of her own clothes until she’s also in her underwear and her shimmy to get out of her pants draws Din’s attention in the dark. “Wait, what are we doing? Are we gonna’--?” he hesitates, trying to put the pieces together. His brain is trying so hard to keep up with the situation. “I’ll try, but I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

She laughs at that. It’s so perfectly Din--sick enough he can barely speak and still worried about putting her first. _What a sweet idiot._ The kid is snoring at their heads already, but he’ll manage his way under the blanket at some point--he always manages to sleep next to her one way or another.

“Don’t worry,” she says, as she pats his shoulder. “Save your performance anxiety for another day. I’m not going to jump your bones when you can barely manage to string 3 words together.” He lets out a breath he was holding either in anticipation or anxiety and goes boneless again. “Go to sleep, Din. I’m just going to lay beside you until you get over this mess.” She’s not worried about their lack of clothes as much as he seems to be. It’s not like they’re naked. Her underwear is pretty sensible, all things considered; boy-short cut panties and a stretchy black bandeau that does nothing for support but keeps her covered when she sleeps.

She lays back down next to him until they’re face to face in the dark, not even an inch between them. She puts a hand on his ribcage and instantly feels much different about their state of undress, no matter how necessary it is. “I just need to feel you breathing,” she explains both to herself and to him, as if she needs to defend her reason to touch him like this. “With the kid’s snoring there’s no way I’ll hear your breathing over him, but I’ll notice if I feel you start struggling. I can stay up to wake you if you get worse. Does your skin hurt too bad of I keep my hand here?” she asks, hoping she’s not hurting the nerve endings in his skin with her hand.

He’s so warm and comfortable as he’s falling into that pleasant place between asleep and awake but still manages to assure her. “No…….doesn’t hurt……..…feels...good.”

Before she knows what’s happened, Din throws his arm over her and pulls her flush against him as he drifts off and buries his face into her neck. He pushes one of his bare legs between hers and she parts her thighs to make room. Her feet naturally hook around his and she noticed he had kicked off her socks, so their bare feet were rubbing against one another. He’s asleep.

He sleeps deep and still but only half an hour passes before she feels his eyelashes flutter against her skin as he wakes up once more, lifting his head off her chest and spitting her hair out of his mouth from where his face is buried in it. It’s pitch dark, but she can see the wheels turning in his head as he takes in his near nakedness, her bare legs between his thighs, and her bare back under his hand. “Did we--?”

She laughs as she surmises what he’s asking. “I know you’re sick, but trust me, you'd remember that.”

As amusing as he is like this, she wants him to go back to sleep—he needs it. He’s still wrapped around her so tight she can only move her hands, so she gently combs her fingers through his sweaty disheveled hair. She’s never seen it in the light, so she soaks in every detail she can in the dark; its texture, its length, its wave that’s almost a curl at the edges. He breathes deep and even when she touches his hair and arches his face into her hand to extend the contact.

“Can I touch your face? It’s dark,” she assures him.

“Please,” he replied, as he rested his head back on her chest before finishing his thought, “don't stop touching me, I like it.” She runs her fingers down from his hairline over is temples and down the side of his face to cup his cheek. She takes in the coarse hair on his cheeks that’s long enough to have become softer than she imagines his stubble to be. He lets out a content sigh and relaxes against her, so she continues.

“Tell me if I go too far,” she says, as she traces the fine lines around his mouth before letting the pads of her fingers ghost over his lips. _They’re so dry._

“You won’t, I promise,” he assures her, sounding surprisingly sure. “I like it when you touch me.”

His soft words and chapped lips bring her back to reality for a moment. _He’s sick. What the hell is she doing? She should stop. He might not be at one hundred percent and his boundaries might be blurred right now._

“You sure this is okay?” she asks, as he presses his face further into her hand.

“You can’t see me, can you?” he asks, and seems completely untroubled by this touching in the dark.

“No.” The total absence of light meant she couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face.

“Then it’s fine,” he concludes.

“You have a nice face,” she admits, after tracing his feature once more. “I take back all the jokes about you being as ugly as a blurgg under there.”

He laughs.

“Cara, you're so beautiful. It’s not fair.” It’s her turn to laugh and the movement jostles him a little. “It’s dark idiot, you can't even see me.”

_He begs to differ, so he argues with her_. “I always see you, even when I close my eyes. I hear your voice in my head and I see you in my dreams. I could recreate your face perfectly a hundred years from now, even if I’d forgotten my own name.” Before she can even register a flush of heat at his words he speaks again.

“But that’s not what I meant. You’re beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with your skin and can’t be touched by the light or the dark. You’re a beautiful person and I’m glad you’re here.”

She’s doesn’t really have anything eloquent to say to a compliment like that, but he would have continued even if she had interrupted.

“--kind-hearted, honest, brave, selfless, strong, stubborn as Hell.”

She laughs at that last one. “You had me until the very end Din,” she jokes, trying to lighten the mood. This is turning into a conversation she only wants to have if she knows he’s not high on frog slime or lacking blood in his brain due to an allergic reaction. She doesn’t want to hear this if it’s just a fever dream or ramblings that won’t hold true in the morning.

‘ _He sounds surprisingly lucid now though_ ,’ she thinks. The poison that soaked into the skin of his hands must be working its way out of his system or breaking down with time. She has to be sure though.

“Are you going to remember any of this tomorrow?”

“I hope so,” he says, heartbreaking in his honesty. “I’ve never touched anyone like this.” He rubs his legs in between hers where they’re tangled together. She can feel the hair on his calves and imagines it to be dark, not unlike the hair on his forearms she’s glimpsed in the sun. “No one has ever touched me like this. I don’t want to forget.”

She doesn’t think he’s lying but she finds it hard to believe. ‘ _What about intimately’_ , she thinks, hating herself for prying into his personal life even in the privacy of her own mind. She doesn’t have the most normal track record there either, but she knows he’s had bed-partners before. _What did he mean he never touched anyone like this?_

It was almost as if he could read her mind.

“Never like _this_ ,” he insists, burying his face in the blanket of her hair and tightening his arms around her. “I’ve never _touched_ anyone else like this.” He uses his leg that’s tangled between hers to hold his weight as he shifts to lay on top of her. His second leg joins the first and she moves her own out of the way, so he’s settled comfortably between her spread legs. Her thighs naturally hug his hips and it feels too good to be under him like this with only the thinnest of fabric separating them. His hands move under her shoulder blades and her own naturally curl under his arms to rest on the bare expanse of his back. He shifts purposefully against her where she's most sensitive and she has to bite her lip to stay quiet and to keep herself from rocking back against him as he adjusts to get comfortable. He buries his face where her neck meets her shoulder and she moans as she feels his lips on her skin.

She tries with everything she has not to enjoy it but can't manage it --they fit together perfectly like this. It’s too easy--too natural to deny the rightness of it in this moment. She understands what he meant now—

_She’s never touched someone like this either._

It wasn’t hurried or desperate-- just warm and gentle and tentative in an innocent way that scared her more than she’d care to admit. She was lying skin-to-skin with someone she cared about and cared about her—it was that easy.

_Fuck that. Who was she kidding? It was anything but easy._ She could do fighting, impossible odds, overcoming obstacles, or shooting something, but _easy_ ….? She had no idea how to do ‘ _easy_ ’….

It’s the middle of the night and everything is quiet except for her racing thoughts. To drown out the chaos she focuses on his mouth instead and suddenly her mind is quiet like the night surrounding them. There’s no mission, no broken Empire, no shitty history they’re trying to atone for, and no reason they can’t be together like this. He’s just a man and she’s just a woman and as much as she wonders if they’d be lying together like this if he wasn’t feeling ill, this is the most content she’s been in such a long time.

‘ _It would be so easy to love him_ ,’ she thinks, if only he’d ever given any indication he thought about her as a woman, or someone he desired--he was always so respectful it was hard to get a read on him. It would be so easy to lose herself in his embrace; in the haze of desire that seems to permeate every inch of the ship sometimes--but in this very moment, his face is too hot to let this go much further. This isn’t everyday Din right now--he’s ill, and she’d rather cut off her own hand than take advantage of him while he’s vulnerable and placing his trust in her. _She just needs to nudge him off so he can settle back to sleep._

“Din.”

She manages to say his name, but it doesn’t sound like her at all--it’s soft and barely more than a whisper. She sounds needy. _That couldn’t possibly be her voice._

His name on her lips sounded like a plea to his ears and he reacted to it immediately, easing the rest of his weight onto her. Her legs adjust around him as his weight pushes her further into the mattress.

He nuzzles her neck before speaking directly into her skin. “Is this a dream?”

His hand extricates itself from under her to run down the curve of her breast; the only thing separating his hand from her suddenly heated skin is the thinnest layer of stretchy cotton that she suddenly wishes wasn’t there.

“You’re so soft. I want to touch you,” he pleads. His hand continues down the smooth plane of her bare stomach and her muscles tense at the unexpected sensation as he continues lower. The sudden clench of her muscles made him moan and flatten his hand to feel the firm ridges of her abdomen.

“—so soft _and_ hard. You’re _perfect_.” His breath is hot against her neck as he speaks and it’s breaking down any resolve she had to push him away. There are goosebumps crawling down her legs as they’re splayed to accommodate his hips and the hairs on her arms stand up against her will.

He had asked her a question, so she willed her mouth and her throat to form words that were more than just a strangled moan. “N-no...it’s not a dream.”

“Are you sure?” he asks disbelievingly, right under her ear. “It feels like the dreams I have about you.”

He’s so warm and he sounds so happy to be embracing her she doesn’t want to push him off to make him sleep beside her. “You feel so good, Cara. Touch me, please.” She allows herself one more moment of weakness only at his request; her palms lay flat against his shoulder blades and she allows her hands to roam down his back. He’s sweaty now, but no longer feverish. She smooths her hands down his shoulders and the expanse of his back, feeling the musculature shift over his ribs in response to the rare caress as she moves all the way down to his hips, before sweeping them up again in a long smooth motion that he seems to love if his groan against her ear was any indication.

While his mouth had been moving against her as he spoke there was no mistaking the change in pressure that comes next. He kisses her neck; soft, but full of promise and covetous intent as she suddenly lays perfectly still. He doesn’t just do it once though; he presses his lips to her smooth warm neck again and again, soft at first before increasing the pressure; moving up and along the underside of her jaw. She sucked in a breath as she thought she felt his warm tongue dart out to smooth over her skin as he sucked a bruise under her ear. “Your pulse is speeding up….” he says, and she’s almost certain she can hear the teasing tone of his voice now as he settles down against her chest. Before she can think of an intelligent reply to either cool things off or edge them forward, she feels his whole body relax against her and she realizes why.

He had finally fallen asleep.

Her first thought was _‘Oh, thank God.’_

Her second thought was, ‘ _my stomach is killing me_.’

……………….

Din wakes up in the morning, disoriented but feeling back to normal. He only knows it’s morning from the tiny numbers projected against the wall in dim light. He fumbles for his helmet in the dark, but his movements jostle Cara, where one of his arms is trapped under her body and one of his legs is tangled in between hers. He feels the shift of her bare legs in response to his movements and he fumbles to get his face covered before turning on the lights, instantly alert and awake. All he sees is the lightly freckled expanse of her bare shoulders and the blood in his body splits off in two different directions: half of it goes South for obvious reasons and the other half goes North to his brain where it’s needed to assess the situation.

The shifting of his body disturbs Cara and she starts to wake up. “Din, what the Hell,” she grumbles. “Go back to sleep, it’s still early.”

He doesn’t even know where to begin, so he asks the safer of the two questions swirling around his mind. “Where's the kid?” he asks, remembering he went to sleep with them last night.

The kid was curled up against her bare back. “Right here,” she replied, lifting up the blanket to put his mind at ease but it has the opposite effect as he sees her barely covered body under the blanket as well. The bunk is tight, but he manages to pull back an inch or so from her endless bare skin to regain control of his brain.

“You're in your.....Why are we naked?” He can’t think of a better way to ask what his mind won’t stop focusing on.

“We’re not naked, we’re in our underwear,” she argues.

“But why?”

“You don't remember?” she asked, slightly disappointed that the night she had found so much comfort in wasn’t even a memory to him.

“Uhhh...” he says uncertainly, as he racks his brain. She sounds let down that he doesn’t remember the previous night, so he focuses to try to put it all together. He remembers lying next to her and then on top of her as she ran her hands through his hair and down his back. He thought he remembered pressing kisses into her neck but that had to be just a dream--in his dream he heard her moan.

“I remember laying on you,” he said confidently. “Your neck was warm, and you touched my hair.”

“So, you do remember,” she said, relieved that he wasn’t horrified at the overtly intimate cuddling he had initiated. She was ready to do some damage control and lighten the situation if need be, but he sounded content with the memory. “Now, were you planning on getting out of bed or staying here and keeping me warm?”

_That’s the easiest decision that’s ever presented itself._

_Of course, Cara would combine teasing him with diffusing the situation to let him safe face._

He regains that inch of ground he had given up during his retreat only moments ago and wraps his arms loosely around her again. With the helmet in place she can’t rest her face against his but instead nestles into the hollow space where his shoulder meets his chest.

“Why is the ship so kriffing cold,” he asks, as he wraps his arms around her tighter as the chill of the room becomes more apparent.

She laughs and tilts her head up toward his. “I turned down the temperature last night because you were sweating so bad.”

He would normally focus on her radiant smile or the unruly dishevelment of her hair, but he looks at her eyes--she’s exhausted, he can tell. Did she stay up all night? _She must have._

‘ _Dammit Cara_ ,’ he thinks. She stayed up taking care of him when he knew she was miserable too. He saw the whites of her eyes and saw the pink tinge of multiple burst capillaries--not a lot of things caused that. “Did you throw up last night?”

“Yeah, once or twice,” she says, playing off the severity of her discomfort only hours ago. 

“Why didn’t you wake me?” he asks, feeling guilty in the directionality of the caretaking that obviously went on.

“Wake you?” she laughs. “I had to crawl out from underneath you like a felled tree and you didn't even flinch. You were pretty out of it. You needed the sleep.”

“You should have woken me,’ he insisted, hating the thought of her being sick on her own while he had her taking care of him.

“If it had been bad, I would have,” she assured him, “but it was just some puke. I got it out of my system. It wasn’t exactly my finest hour. You didn’t miss much. I can do a re-enactment later if you like.”

Din thinks back to when they first laid down and he had been much sicker than her. “Did I throw up too?”

Cara answers without missing a beat. She already had an answer planned. “Yeah, all over me.” Cara manages not to look to off-put but her nose crinkles a little and he feels horrified.

“Cara,” he says, and her name sounds like an apology before he even gets to his real one, “ I’m so sor—"

Her crinkled nose turns into a grin before she nudges him and pulls the blankets up higher around their bare shoulders. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I’m the only one who got sick. You just got really cuddly and slept it off. You _were_ pretty talkative though,” she says, clearly teasing him.

_Oh shit._

“What did I say?” he asks. “Please tell me it wasn’t anything horrible.”

She wanted to tease him but didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, so she stuck to the truth. “Nothing embarrassing, and nothing _horrible_.”

“Oh, good.” _He’s glad to hear his mouth didn’t get away from him._ _He had felt so comfortable with her beside him he wouldn’t have been surprised if his tongue had been looser than he hoped._

She sees him visibly relax at her assurance and she can’t help herself. “Well, you did say I felt good and you wanted to touch me. _There was that_.”

He sits up a little and stares down at her defiantly; _well,_ _as defiantly as he can wearing the helmet._ “I did not say that, you just made that up.”

She scoffs. “You taking it back, then? Which part? I'm not soft, or you don't want to touch me?”

She picked up her head too to look directly in his visor. The defiant and flirty tone of her voice let him know everything was okay. He hadn’t messed this up. “Not that I believe you, but what if I don’t want take back either of those statements?”

She smiles as she pulls the blanket around them tighter. “Then I’d say we should stay in bed a while longer and let the kid sleep in. We wouldn’t want to wake him up by getting out of bed and putting clothes on, right?”

Din doesn’t need any convincing. Sleeping the morning away in bed with Cara, with barely any clothing between the two of them? He was sold.

He pretends to weigh his options before making a decision. “The kid _is_ really grumpy when we wake him up. You’ve convinced me.”

She snorts. “Shut up and do a better impression of a space-heater.” She tentatively wraps an arm around him to test the water when they’re both conscious and alert and is pleased when he pulls her fully against him, exactly as he had done the night before. The feel of his skin felt wonderful on hers, even better since she knew he was recovered and any affection he showed her was real. He called for the lights to go back out before taking his helmet off again so he could press his face against her hair. She had stayed up all night and he enjoyed the chance to reverse their roles. It was her turn to fall asleep as she felt him running his hands through her hair as they waited for the kid to wake them up to start the day. At her back, the little fuzzy kid settled back down as he closed his eyes. He could pretend to be asleep for a little while longer.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Drop me a comment if you enjoyed :)  
> I love hearing from you guys <3
> 
> The next story I'm working on is an AU, which is very much not what I thought I'd ever write so you can skip the next one if you like :D

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I'm Sober](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25229203) by [HoldingHands (Sapphireth)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphireth/pseuds/HoldingHands)




End file.
